How Can I Look Upon You In Your Shame?

Ok, this post is going to sound religious in nature, and I understand that many of us Infidels are not religious. However, I don't think any of us Infidels do not understand that our precious Western Civilization was built on ideas, rather than tribalism.

We believe in the ideas of our civilization. We believe in Freedom of Speech. We believe that all men were created equal. We believe in the inherent value of the individual.

Brave men have fought and died for these ideas so that we may enjoy the freedoms and rights that we have today. We know that these men did this with more than cold-calculation in their hearts. They fought and died because they had faith that these ideas, these values, these intangible things, would create a more perfect society than the world had ever seen before.

So, please sit with the word faith here, even if you aren't religious. Because, I think we all have faith in the ideas that go to make up Western Civilization.

Here, The Anchoress give her thoughts on the forced conversions of Fox News Reporters Centanni and Wiig:


It is the rarest of days when I disagree with my favorite blogfather Ed Morrissey, but after mulling over this post of his as well as others, and after thinking quite a lot about the forced conversion of Fox News’ Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig while under the guns and knives of their Islamofascist captors, I find that I do disagree with him.

Ed wrote: I, for one, am happy that Centanni and Wiig had the wits and the luck to get out of Gaza alive. That to me is a victory.

He is not alone in thinking this way. Indeed, I would bet he is among a fair majority (including an engineer friend) who are perhaps overthinking the thing.

Faith and Reason share a kinship, and within that kinship the natural and supernatural wave back and forth, like wind-stirred wheat in a field, but only to an point. The gift of faith is itself supernatural, but let’s call it a small-s-supernatural, one in which reason may be easily ascertained. I think once circumstances have led one - willingly or unwillingly - to confront capital-S-Supernatural, the waters become very deep, and reason must necessarily hang back near the shore.

The demand to “convert or die” is not a thinking demand, it is not born of reason. It is culled forth from a dark heart given over to something larger than a human sense or sensibility. It is an unnatural requirement; it is Supernatural. As such, it can only be properly answered through Supernatural means, through a heart that is not dark but which is equally given over to something larger than our rational and reductive imaginings. Can you reduce the response to a forced conversion into whether one “meant it” or not? Yes, you can, but in doing so you have taken your eyes off of something hugely in play but easy to miss - that the greatest feats of heroism written in the annals of human history have come about through a combination of faith and reason, but with reason bringing up the rear.

Firefighters on 9/11 asked a blessing from Fr. Mychal Judge before they headed into the burning towers of the World Trade Center. Reason cautioned that running into such a hellish conflagration was foolhardy - faith whispered something else, and it won.

Reason told Casper ten Boom and his spinster daughters Corrie and Betsy that it was risky-unto-madness to try to hide Jews in a bedroom wall while Nazis occupied their village - faith shrugged, “how can you not take the risk?”

It has been mentioned that we are battling an enemy that “loves death more than life.” Certainly we have seen that they are willing to die for their beliefs. An enemy who does not care if he dies as long as he can kill you, too, is an enemy who cannot be reasoned with. This is an enemy thoroughly appreciative of the power of martyrdom, its ability to inspire, to convince and even to claim victory.

We seem to have forgotten that martyrdom - a foolish waste, to Reason’s sensibility - is often the key componant toward changing social perceptions and even morals. The virgin martyrs, much derided in our “enlightened” era, were the first women to declare themselves set apart, meant to be more than chattel, able to declare themselves as belonging to no man or house, to “no one but Christ.” An unheard of concept!

To my knowledge, the pre-kidnapping religious beliefs of Centanni and Wiig are unknown. Some say that if the men had no particular faith to start with, their going along with a forced conversion was a reasonable tactic, and perhaps it was. If faith is meaningless to you, then a forced conversion will be too.

But whether Centanni and Wiig were men of faith, or not, their “conversions” were a sort of victory for our enemies. They displayed to the world what the West “holds dear.” I am not saying the newsmen were cowards, not at all. I’m only saying that in a clash of civilizations, their pronouncements about Allah and Mohammed, and their confession of new, Islamic names, was a real-time demonstration to the Islamofascists in our midst that “staying alive,” means the world to us. It can be translated as “look at these callow Western dogs, so in love with life, so beholden to nothing that they will say anything, do anything, even allow us to rename them, to cling to life…while we will give up everything…”


Go read the whole thing.

I, of course, would take issue with the Anchoress saying that Centanni and Wiig are not cowards. They are. Does that mean they ought to be jailed for treason, or even ostracized? No.

Instead, what I think is that, as a society, we ought to judge them as cowards and, metaphorically, we should look the other way when we pass them on the street. It ought to be painful for us to look upon them in the same way as it is painful to look at a man in the midst of deep embarrassment, or shame.

Hey, I'm not saying that I would have the bravery to stand up for my beliefs, although, I would hope that I would. But, I am saying that if I were to fail such a test, I would expect that my society would find me lacking. I would be ashamed of myself. It would be hard for me to look others in the eye.

Frankly, this is not so much about the Fox News Reporters as it is about preparing ourselves as a civilization for the fight that is ahead of us. We are going to need to steel ourselves. We will need new definitions of bravery and cowardice and honor. We aren't simply having a national dialogue about welfare reform or national healthcare here. Our battles have become bigger, and we need to become bigger to fight them.